Main menu

You are here

Finally Landed an iPhone Development Job

January 25, 2009 - 13:51 — Jason

I haven't made a blog post in 2 weeks for a pretty good reason. I was lucky enough to land an iPhone development job with a mobile dev start up. So I've been busy working on getting up to speed with how the company works, and getting to know my way around the iPhone platform. And if there is one thing I've learned in the last 2 weeks, it's that my 500 page iPhone dev book can not cover everything you can learn from hands on experience and a ton of googling.

So here's how the job capture went down. On a Wednesday night, I was on craigslist looking for iPhone dev jobs using my link that I posted in my last blog post. I would once in a while hit refresh to see if anyone posted a job. So about at 10pm, I saw a job post that seemed to have been ripped right from my mind. They talked about looking for intermediate developers who don't have too much mobile dev experience, and have a passion to learn from developers with 5-10 years of mobile dev experience. I couldn't believe it. It was as if someone was watching my life, and posted a job post directed towards me, and it was some elaborate hoax.

So I quickly grabbed attached a resume to an email and just wrote a ton of content about why I want the job, what I've been doing, and what I expect out of the job. Basically it was my first cover letter. I'd never written one before. I didn't want to come off looking too desperate, so I reread it a bit, softened the language, and then when I was comfortable with the content, I sent it off and went to bed. For some reason I woke up at 4am and checked my email. Turned out I got a reply within hours and they wanted to know when I could come in for an interview. I told them that day, anytime, and the sooner the better. So around 9:30, they got back to me and asked me to come in for an interview at 4pm.

So I took the train in, did some studying on my way, and walked in to the interview.. I wasn't asked too many questions about objective-c or cocoa touch. I did get a few, but I guess it was to just test my knowledge of the platform. Then I got some java questions which I thought I aced, but then the interview got more comfortable.. I didn't have many questions because based on their questions, I knew what I was getting myself into. I thought it was funny that at the end of the interview I was asked "what sports do you play?" When I said soccer, they stopped me right there. I felt a bit more comfortable. Then they asked "If we were to move forward with you, when could you start?" to which I replied "today, or tomorrow, whichever is more comfortable to you". They looked at each other, and then I said "should I get comfortable?" We all laughed and I knew I locked that one up.

The funny part was that one of the co-founders knew (Andrew) Varden, my room mate of 6 years while I was attending University of Guelph. So I guess you can say that was my 'in'. So later that night, I was offered the job. I applied for, interviewed for, and was offered the job all within 24 hours. If you read my previous blog post about locking up talented developers, this is a perfect example of how it's done. It shouldn't take an employer very long to know whether an individual would fit within their organization.

So like I said, it has been 2 weeks at the company, and all I've been doing is iPhone work. I've been learning a LOT about the platform. It's been slow because I didn't know everything about delegates and data sources that I know now, and how to format and style table cells. Adding graphics to a system is a bit terrifying too, but I'm learning that as well. I've taken some screen shots, and will post them when the product is finally up and in the app store.

The other good thing about this job is that they don't do just iPhone stuff. They do BB, Android, Brew, Symbian, and Windows Mobile as well.. And any other platforms that come up. I'll eventually get a chance to touch all of the different platforms and probably specialize in 1 or 2. I think that part excites me the most. I get to play with phones in the company too. So yeah.. I like my new job and I hope to be with the company for a long time. :)